THE GEM IN THE TOWER

Conan has returned to the sea in "The Gem in the Tower." According to my copy of Conan The Swordsman (the 2002 hardback which seems to have once belonged to the library in Tempe, Arizona), the prologue states that Conan is now in his middle thirties. Though his days on the sea with Belit are far behind him (and let's be real, were extremely short to begin with), his nickname "Amra the Lion" still carries a lot of weight, gaining him a first mate position on the ship the Hawk with a group of Barachan pirates. The prologue notes that Conan will be with these Barachan buccaneers for quite some time, but there really aren't that many Barachan pirate stories in the Conan canon. 

"The Gem in the Tower" is a decent Conan story, but it never really rises above decent. Weirdly enough, it's a rewrite of a Lin Carter story, "Black Moonlight," featuring an original character named Thongor. While we've read four different stories that began their lives as Conanless Howard tales, and several others that began life as Conan stories but then first saw publication with the Hyborian Age serial numbers filed off such as "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" becoming "The Gods of the North," we've never yet read a story that started as a Conanless tale from someone else. 

​The weird thing to me is that "Black Moonlight" was already a published story in 1976. Like, it was already out there for the public. So when Lin Carter rewrites it to have Conan in it and puts out "The Gem in the Tower" two years later in 1978, I get a little confused. "Black Moonlight" is still available and everything; you can read it for free online in Fantastic, where it was originally published. My question is: if you're Lin Carter, why do you do this? It's not like one of Howard's unpublished stories that made its way to the page as a Conan story first. Can you imagine doing this in any other medium? Like two years after a sci-fi movie comes out, the same director gets hired to do a Star Wars film and just does the same movie from two years ago but with Star Wars characters and locations?

It feels a little bullshitty, and makes Carter seem like a hack who was just hoping to profit off of using Conan's name. I don't know. It's weird. I'll get back to the actual story now.

---

There's some good description, mostly of the sunset, and some fun adventure in this story on a nameless island in the western sea. The bat creature is a decent villain, mostly because of how frustratingly durable he is against the pirates, and I really like that the tower is long-abandoned. Its feared sorcerer, we learn at the end of the story, is already dead, sitting on his throne. But the tower in which he lies is much, much older, and I think that's sort of fun.

This is one of those stories that I think Roy Thomas honestly did much better in Savage Sword 45.

That issue of Savage Sword also has a totally ripping cover with art done by Nestor Redondo, which I've put at the top of this page. It kind of makes me wish more comic covers had elements like lightning and fire.

Conan's moved on to a new part of his career. Gone are his mercenary days (for now) and his second stint at piracy has begun. I'm not sure if this is only going to be a two-story stint with the pirates, though I've read other stories of Conan's runs with the Barachan pirates (Savage Sword issue 72, for example), so those may exist more elsewhere. One thing that I find interesting is that in this post about the novel Conan: The Road of Kings, Gary Romeo over at Sprague de Camp Fan publishes a letter from L. Sprague de Camp about some of his planned Conan books and their chronological order. He places it right after "Drums of Tombalku," and I've obviously filled that gap in with a few other stories.

I think when I'm done with my chronology, I'm going to try to fit as many Savage Sword stories as I can into the chronology and see where they sit. But right now, here's how I'm breaking up Conan's career to this point. 

The Coming of Conan

1. The Frost-Giant's Daughter (Note: I think this one belongs early, not before "Ice Worm")
2. Legions of the Dead
3. The Thing in the Crypt

The thief period

1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. The Hall of the Dead
3. The God in the Bowl
4. Rogues in the House

The Turanian mercenary period

1. The Hand of Nergal
2. The City of Skulls
3. The People of the Summit
4. The Curse of the Monolith
5. The Blood-Stained God
6. The Lair of the Ice Worm

"Goin' Down South"

1. Queen of the Black Coast
2. The Vale of Lost Women
3. The Castle of Terror
4. The Snout in the Dark
5. Hawks Over Shem
6. Black Colossus
7. Shadows in the Dark

The kozaki period

1. Iron Shadows in the Moon (Note: I don't think this one should be canon)
2. The Road of the Eagles
3. A Witch Shall Be Born
4. Black Tears
5. Shadows in Zamboula
6. The Star of Khorala

"Commander Conan"

1. The Slithering Shadow
2. Drums of Tombalku (Note: I'm not sure this one should be canon)
3. The Devil in Iron
4. The Flame Knife
5. The People of the Black Circle

The Barachan pirate period

1. The Gem in the Tower
2. The Pool of the Black One, which we'll read next time.

​
★★★☆☆